Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"J. Lewis Muir" <[email protected]> · Wed, 14 Feb 2018 13:20:07 -0600

On 02/14, Jameson Graef Rollins wrote:
> > If you switched to pkgsrc, I think you'd get more users and then
> > more contributors.
>
> Sorry, I really haven't been following this conversation, but I just
> want to point out that a *lot* more systems use apt-based package
> management than pkgsrc.  I had never even heard of pkgsrc until it was
> mentioned in this thread. pkgsrc is surely quite obscure, and wouldn't
> really facilitate larger adoption, if that's what the conversation is
> about.

Hi, Jamie!

That's not what the conversation is about.  The idea is that a packaging
system targeted at Debian-based platforms is limited to just that.  It
excludes RHEL and any other non-Debian-based Linux platform, and it
excludes non-Linux platforms like macOS, Windows (Cygwin), and Solaris.

> I don't see that offering things up in an apt archive excludes people
> from setting up other systems to distribute the package formats of
> their choice.

Are you talking about creating the packages in some other system or
about using a package translator to convert the Debian packages into
some other package format?  If the former, then of course, the Debian
packages don't prevent anyone from creating their own packages in some
other system, but it's a lot of work.  If the latter, Michael Davidsaver
noted earlier in the thread that package translators don't really work.

> I for one appreciate the apt archives, since we use debian.

Yes, and in my first post in this thread, I wrote that I thought the
project was good.  My point was that I thought it could be even better
if it was based on a packaging system like pkgsrc that would support
many more platforms than just Debian-based ones.  You use it because you
use a Debian-based platform.  If instead you used a RHEL platform, for
example, you wouldn't be using it.  And there's the rub.

Regards,

Lewis

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System